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Hanno Renner

Co-founder and CEO of Personio, the Munich-based HR software platform for small and mid-sized businesses, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.

May 1, 2025

7:35
But if you could take us back a decade or so to the founding of this company, the idea itself, like where it came from and what motivated you and your co-founders to start the company, that would be great.
7:48
Yeah, so back nine years ago, we were still students at the university.
7:51
And obviously, a lot of companies, a lot of people since have told us, oh, but how do you come up with an HR company when you're still a student? And in fact, it's partially luck and partially choice.
8:01
By choice, we decided from the beginning, we didn't want to look for problems that we as students had, because typically those are not relevant problems that you can then solve and impact a bunch of people.
8:10
So we really wanted to find something that is a truly important problem that we can solve for many, many people.
8:16
And then the luck part was a friend of mine that was CTO of a 100-person company telling me about their challenges with having all their people data in spreadsheets and not being able to manage them effectively and compliant in the data and so on.
8:30
And then together with him, we started building a first version.

9 MINS LATER

17:03
And like, what did it ask of you? I imagine you were stepping into the next version of your leadership constantly, so.

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